More Pius XII

     Last Friday, Estase recieved the new book Disinformation by Ion Pacepa and Ronald Rychlak, available from www.wnd.com (World Net Daily).  Estase's first impulse is to put the whole damn book on this blog, but will not do so because to do so would be gross plagiarism and reduce the income to the authors.  This is not to say that the book is one of the most important non-fiction books ever published on the Soviet Union, with the last landmark being The Mitrokhin Archives from the 90s.  Pacepa brings his experience as a former member of the Romanian intelligence service until his 1978 defection.  His co-author, Professor Rychlak, is the author of Hitler, the War, and the Pope, which Estase used in a graduate school project on the Pius XII controversy.  The two explain the defamation of Pius XII as a larger campaign by the Soviet empire to attack the Catholic Church, Israel, and the United States.  Disinformation means to provide false information, but to provide it in such a way as that the information seems to come from non-Soviet sources.  Thus it differs from misinformation, or propaganda, which clearly comes from Soviet or sympathetic sources.  Did you know that Rolf Hochhuth, author of The Deputy, the play that started the idea that Pius XII was a Nazi sympathizer who did nothing about the Holocaust, was a Communist?  Or that a Communist theatre first performed the play?  Or that a Communist produced it on Broadway?  Or that a Communist had the play made into a movie?  Did you know that Rolf Hochhuth's best friend is David Irving, the British holocaust denier who made his name by writing a flattering biography of Hitler?

       "Much of the reliable new information that documents the Kremlin's disinformation operation blaming the CIA for killing Kennedy has come from defectors.  In 1992, the British smuggled Colonel Vasily Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist, out of the Soviet Union, along with some 25,000 highly classified documents he had stolen from KGB foreign intelligence archives over the course of many years.  Those documents represent a miniscule part of the whole KGB archive.  Nevertheless, the FBI described the Mitrokhin Archive as 'the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source.'  In the view of the CIA, this archive is 'the biggest counterintelligence bonanza of the postwar period.'
        Mitrokhin reported on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy stories promoted by the KGB, and his material identifies a number of the agents in the West who were engaged in promoting those conspiracy theories.  Among the most important revelations provided by the Mitrokhin Archive are the highly classified KGB documents proving that the so-called Kennedy assassination conspiracy, which to this day has generated thousands of books all around the world, was born in the KGB, and that some of it was financed by the KGB.
       Equally significant are the documents in the Mitrokhin Archive showing that the KGB had constructed this conspiracy using some of the same paid KGB agents who were called upon to promote the disinformation operation designed to frame Pius XII as having been pro-Nazi:  Carlo Marzani, codenamed Nord, who received a significant amount of money from the KGB to produce pro-Soviet books;  I.F. Stone, codenamed Blin (Russian for 'pancake'), who began receiving the Kremlin's money in 1944;  and Victor Perlo, codenamed Raid or Raider, identified as a Soviet agent in the Venona electronic intercepts, as well as by defectors.
       That should come as no surprise.  After all, both operations took off in 1963 (The Deputy hit the Berlin stage in February, and Oswald shot the president in November), both would have been dreamt up by Khrushchev with the help of his spy chief, General Sakharovsky--the former chief Soviet intelligence advisor for Romania--and both would have been carried out by the same disinformation experts on the desk at KGB headquarters at that time.
       According to documents in the Mitrokhin Archive, the first book on the assassination published in the United States, Oswald:  Assassin or Fall Guy?;  was authored by a former member of the German Communist Party, Joachim Joesten, and published in New York by KGB agent Carlo Aldo Marzani.  The publisher Marzani was regularly and generously paid by the KGB (and by the Communist Party's Central Committee) to promote books of a progressive nature by both American and foreign authors.  Until the Mitrokhin Archive documents began appearing in 1999, it was not known that Joesten's publisher, Marzani & Munsell, received subsidies totaling $672,000 from the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the early 1960s.
         Shortly before publishing Joesten's book on Oswald, Marzani supported the KGB's attack on Pius XII.  As noted in an earlier chapter discussing Hochhuth's The Deputy, when that anti-Pius XII play debuted in Berlin in 1963, Marzani was able on short notice to republish Shylock:  The History of a Character, an early book describing the mistreatment of Jews by popes, which helped to advertise Hochhuth's play.
       It is noteworthy that Joesten's book saw the light of day just a couple of days before the Warren Commission Report was published, conforming to the KGB's instructions that we in the DIE received in the Dragon Operation.  In his book, Joesten also follows what we knew as Dragon Operation guidelines by describing Oswald as an FBI agent provocateur with a CIA background, who was used to shield the real assassins, and unnamed group of American right-wing conspirators.
       No one knows how Joesten became such an instant authority on the assassination.  He has said that he spent five days in Dallas 'investigating' the tragedy and that he then, on December 11, 1963, returned home to his wife.  But she said he failed to show up for dinner that evening, instead leaving her a note saying he had gone to Europe.  And gone he was for several months.  Later that year, Joesten began publishing articles and books on the Kennedy assassination.
       As discussed earlier, when people asked Rolf Hochhuth where he got his outrageous stories about Pius XII, he would say he had spent three months in Rome chatting up a talkative German bishop, but that the source material had to remain sealed for fifty years.  The public has not been satisfied with either five days in Dallas or three months in Rome.
        The first review of Joesten's book, which praised it to the skies, was signed by KGB agent Victor Perlo and was published on September 23, 1964, in New Times, which I knew was a KGB front at one time printed in Romania.  In the 1930s, Perlo was the head of a group of important agents run by the communist underground in the United States.  In 1944, Perlo and his group were turned over to the KGB predecessor organization and handled by Elizabeth Bentley, who defected a year later.  That transfer, incidentally, took place at the New York apartment of the lawyer John Abt, a lifelong member of the American Communist Party, who--according to the Vassiliev Archive--regularly helped the party underground, the KGB and the GRU with funding and legal matters.  After his arrest, Oswald stated he wanted to be represented by John Abt and tried to reach him by telephone, but Abt was away for the weekend.  The Vassiliev Archive also documents that Perlo frequently wrote articles for various communist fronts, signing them with assorted pseudonyms.  In the 1940s, he helped the writer I.F. Stone compile material for various exposes.
       On December 9, 1963, I.F. Stone (KGB codename 'Blin') published a long article in which he tried to justify why America had killed its own president.  He called Oswald and Ruby 'rightist crackpots,' but put the real blame on the 'warlike Administration' of the United States, that was trying to sell Europe a 'nuclear monstrosity.'  Stone was another paid KGB agent who a few months later joined in the attack on Pius XII.  As noted in an earlier chapter, on March 9, 1964, Stone signed an article in his own weekly publication that praised Hochhuth's play The Deputy and attacked Pius XII as having been 'friendly to Hitler' and to Mussolini.  That same month, Stone's sister, Judy Stone, published a friendly interview with Hochhuth in Ramparts which, as will be seen below, would play a significant role in promoting the KGB disinformation connected with the Kennedy assassination as well.
       So again we see the KGB rounding up the 'usual suspects,' both in order to smear Pius XII as pro-Hitler and to blame the CIA and other American targets for the death of President Kennedy.
        Joachim Joesten dedicated his book Oswald:Assassin or Fall Guy? to Mark Lane, an American leftist who in 1966 produced the bestseller Rush to Judgment, alleging Kennedy was assassinated by a right-wing American group.  Documents in the Mitrokhin Archive show that the KGB indirectly sent Mark Lane money ($2,000), and that KGB operative, Genrikh Borovik, was in regular contact with him.  Another KGB defector, Colonel Oleg Gordievsky (former KGB station chief in London), has identified Borovik as the brother-in-law of Col. General Vladimir Kryuchkov, who in 1974 became the head of KGB foreign intelligence, in 1988 chairman of the KGB, and in August 1991 led the anti-glasnost coup in Moscow.
        The year 1967 saw the publication of two more books attributed to Joesten:  The Case Against Lyndon Johnson in the Assassination of President Kennedy and Oswald:  The Truth.  Both books insinuated that President Johnson and his CIA had killed Kennedy.  They were soon followed by Mark Lane's A Citizen's Dissent (1968).  According to assassination researcher Vincent Bugliosi, Mark Lane has been 'by far the most persistent and audible single voice' in making Americans believe that reactionary elements in the United States killed Kennedy.  Lane has also intensively traveled abroad to preach that America is an 'FBI police state' that killed its own president.
       Mark Lane helped New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrest a local man (Clay Shaw), whom Garrison accused of conspiring with elements of U.S. intelligence to murder Kennedy in order to stop the latter's efforts to end the Cold War.  Garrison's book On the Trail of the Assassin, inspired Oliver Stone's movie JFK, which, as I mentioned prior, claims the assassination of President Kennedy was the result of a conspiracy at the highest level of the U.S. government.

       Soon after launching Operation 'SIG,' Andropov unleashed Operation 'Tayfun' (Russian for typhoon), aimed at expanding international terrorism into Western Europe.  As was usual for such international terrorism into Western Europe.  As was usual for such international operations, the KGB established another 'socialist division of labor' to mobilize the entire bloc intelligence community in support of its extended terrorist war.  The Soviet Union would assume the most difficult tasks, those of creating new terrorist organizations, indoctrinating their members, and providing intelligence, money, and political support for terrorist operations--which Andropov called 'armed struggle.'
       The Czechoslavakian foreign intelligence service was charged with supplying terrorists with an odorless plastic explosive (Semtex-H) that could not be detected by sniffer dogs at airports.  In 1990, Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel acknowledged that the communist regime of his country had secretly shipped a thousand tons of this odorless plastic explosive to Palestinian and Libyan terrorists.  According to Havel, a mere two hundred grams was enough to blow up a commercial plane in flight.  'World terrorism has supplies of Semtex to last 150 years,' Havel estimated.
        The East Germans had to provide the terrorists with arms and ammunition.  According to secret documents found after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the archives of the East German Minstry for State Security, colloquially known as the Stasi, in 1983 alone its foreign intelligence service provided the PLO with $1,877,600 worth of AK-47 ammunition.
        The Cubans mass-produced concealment devices for transporting the plastic explosive and weapons into the target countries.  In 1972, I spent a 'working vacation' in Havana as the guest of Raul Castro, at that time head of Cuba's military and security forces, and visited what proved to be the Soviet bloc's largest factory for manufacturing double-walled suitcases and other concealment devices for use in secretly transporting weapons.  General Sergio del Valle Jimenez, Cuba's minister of interior, told me that smuggling arms to 'anti-Zionist terrorist organizations' was one of his main jobs.
       Romania's task in that joint venture was to produce false Western passports needed by Andropov's 'freedom fighters.'  During my last six years in Romania, the DIE became the Soviet bloc's main manufacturer of forged West German, Austrian, French, British, Italian, and Spanish passports, which were regularly provided to international terrorist organizations and groups.  The DIE also handcrafted a large collection of entrance visa stamps from all around the world, needed by terrorists to travel to their target countries.
        In the mid-1970s, a wave of terrorism inundated Western Europe.  Tayfun's first major accomplishment was the assassination of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, on December 23, 1975.  That was followed by:  a bomb attack on Gen. Alexander Haig, commander of NATO in Brussels, who was not injured although his armored Mercedes limosine was damaged beyond repair;  a rocket attack against Gen. Frederick J. Kroesen, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, who also escaped alive;  a grenade attack against Alfred Herrhausen, the pro-American chairman of the Deutsche Bank, who was killed;  and an assassination attempt on Hans Neusel, a pro-American state secretary at the West German Ministry of Interior responsible for internal security affairs, who was wounded.
       When the Soviet bloc collapsed in December 1989, those terrorist operations went poof!  and scores of KGB-sponsored terrorists were arrested in the former East Germany.  Peter Michael Diestel, who became East Germany's interior minister after the fall of its communist government, acknowledged in 1990 that Schoenfeld Airport in East Berlin had for years been 'a turntable for terrorists of all kinds.'  Christian Lochte,  a senior official in the West German counterintelligence service, stated that the KGB and the Stasi had done 'everything possible to destabilize this country and the rest of Western Europe as well.'  Moreover, the West German government uncovered evidence that the Stasi had also trained Palestinian terrorist groups in East Germany and in southern Yemen and that it had been involved in the 1986 Libyan bombing of the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin, which killed two American soldiers and wounded 229 other people." Disinformation by Ion Pacepa and Ronald J. Rychlak p.242-5 and 263-5.